The emergence of converged network interface controllers (CNICs) have provided accelerated client/server, clustering, and storage networking, and have enabled the use of unified TCP/IP Ethernet communications. The breadth and importance of server applications that may benefit from CNIC capabilities, together with the emergence of server operating systems interfaces enabling highly integrated network acceleration capabilities, may make CNICs a standard feature of volume server configurations.
The deployment of CNICs may provide improved application performance, scalability and server cost of ownership. The unified Ethernet network architecture enabled by CNIC may be non-disruptive to existing networking and server infrastructure, and may provide significantly better performance at reduced cost alternatives. A server I/O bottleneck may significantly impact data center application performance and scalability. The network bandwidth and traffic loads for client/server, clustering and storage traffic have outpaced and may continue to consistently outpace CPU performance increases and may result in a growing mismatch of capabilities.
A common solution to this challenge has been to use different networking technologies optimized for specific server traffic types, for example, Ethernet for client/server communications and file-based storage, Fibre Channel for block-based storage, and special purpose low latency protocols for server clustering. However, such an approach may have acquisition and operational cost difficulties, may be disruptive to existing applications, and may inhibit migration to newer server system topologies, such as blade servers and virtualized server systems.
One emerging approach focuses on evolving ubiquitous Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) TCP/IP networking to address the requirements of client/server, clustering and storage communications through deployment of a unified Ethernet communications fabric. Such a network architecture may be non-disruptive to existing data center infrastructure and may provide significantly better performance at a fraction of the cost. At the root of the emergence of unified Ethernet data center communications is the coming together of three networking technology trends: TCP offload engine (TOE), remote direct memory access (RDMA) over TCP, and iSCSI.
TOE refers to the TCP/IP protocol stack being offloaded to a dedicated controller in order to reduce TCP/IP processing overhead in servers equipped with standard Gigabit network interface controllers (NICs). RDMA is a technology that allows a network interface controller (NIC), under the control of the application, to communicate data directly to and from application memory, thereby removing the need for data copying and enabling support for low-latency communications, such as clustering and storage communications. ISCSI is designed to enable end-to-end block storage networking over TCP/IP Gigabit networks. ISCSI is a transport protocol for SCSI that operates on top of TCP through encapsulation of SCSI commands in a TCP data stream. ISCSI is emerging as an alternative to parallel SCSI or Fibre Channel within the data center as a block I/O transport for a range of applications including SAN/NAS consolidation, messaging, database, and high performance computing. The specific performance benefits provided by TCP/IP, RDMA, and iSCSI offload may depend upon the nature of application network I/O and location of its performance bottlenecks. Among networking I/O characteristics, average transaction size and throughput and latency sensitivity may play an important role in determining the value TOE and RDMA bring to a specific application.
A focus of emerging CNIC products may be to integrate the hardware and software components of IP protocol suite offload. The CNICs may allow data center administrators to maximize the value of available server resources by allowing servers to share GbE network ports for different types of traffic, by removing network overhead, by simplifying existing cabling and by facilitating infusion of server and network technology upgrades. The CNICs may allow full overhead of network I/O processing to be removed from the server compared to existing GbE NICs. The aggregation of networking, storage, and clustering I/O offload into the CNIC function may remove network overhead and may significantly increase effective network I/O.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.